Why Iraq is Doomed

I think Iraq is well and truly screwed and this rests on the shoulders of one man and one man alone: George W. Bush.

One of the bedrock principles in fixing any problem is this: First, recognize that there is a problem. If your car or a machine in a factory is not working correctly, you cannot do anything about it until the problem is recognized. If the discussion goes like this: "What's that noise?" "Oh, it always sounds like that," or "Why is it doing that?" "It always does that," then you have a problem and it is not with the machine. The problem is with the operator of the mechanic.

And so it is here. There may not be enough people left in this country who think Iraq is going well to fill out a poker game, but the first guy to pull out a chair and sit down at the game will be George W. Bush. Someone who does not recognize that there is a problem cannot be trusted to fix the problem. Someone who does not recognize there is a problem in the fifth year of a war that was supposed to be over in six weeks or six months is either obstinate or retarded or maybe a mixture of both.

There may be a number of things that can be done to fix Iraq. But nobody is going to step up and help out a man who thinks that everything is going swimmingly. Nobody is going to help a man who has made a glaring mistake and is pretending, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that things are on track. Nobody is going to trust a guy who is saying "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes."

Nobody is going to help out a guy who is as stubborn as a mule and who is showing all of the smarts of a mud fence.

If George W. Bush had a shred of integrity or any understanding of what it meant to be an adult, he would stand up, acknowledge that he screwed the pooch and ask for help. But that is never going to happen. George W. Bush is just a shiftless rich kid who had a string of high-paying no-show do-nothing jobs in his life, a man whose daddy's buddies bailed him out of every mess he got into. He clearly viewed the presidency as another no-show job where the real work would be done by his staff and their work would be overseen by people who had worked for his father.

We need to get someone in the job who does not have his or her ego bound up in this war. We need someone who has the personal integrity to take a hard look at what is going on and ask for help.

That person is not and will never be George W. Bush.